jimmah

Well, yeah, obviously this was going to happen. Joe Schad:

Notre Dame plans to interview Brian Kelly tomorrow, probably in NYC
40 minutes ago from txt

Kelly, for his part, went on the Dan Patrick Show and didn't exactly douse the rumors:

Patrick: Have you been offered a contract extension by Cincinnati?
Kelly: We are working on one right now.
Patrick: So there's a chance you could sign the contract extension and put an end to the Notre Dame rumors.
Kelly: Absolutely. There's absolutely a chance of that. And I think there's a chance that I could look at another job. I haven't made that decision yet and I'll do that after today. Today is our team meeting with our players and then I've got a couple of days until our banquet and I want to be able to sit down and figure out what the best course of action is.

Bob Stoops this is not. More:

Patrick: By next Saturday, will I know what your future is?
Kelly: Yes you will.

Yeah… so I guess our best spin on this is that it is possible for really good college head coaches to implode spectacularly when they move jobs. I mean, just look at… aw, hamburgers. That's our head coach.

Is there anything good to take out of this?

"I laugh when I hear it," Gilyard said earlier this month. "Fans ask me all the time, 'Is Coach Kelly going to Notre Dame or Michigan or some bigger place?' Ain't UC big enough? We're in a BCS conference, and we're winning. I think it's a perfect fit for Brian Kelly.

"We had another coach [Dantonio] who looked us straight in the face and said he wasn't leaving. We remember that."

Anyone feel better? Not really? Dangit.

Update: Clausen and Golden Tate are going to the NFL thanks to advice from Weis, so at least there's that.

The Essentials

That's from Chesterton Lep, by the way, who is far more insane than even our recent influx of MS Paint Van Goghs. Insane doesn't actually do it justice.

Run Offense vs. Notre Dame

This has to be crushing victory for Michigan, for now, and for the season. Irish beatwriter Brian Hamilton:

"The defensive line just has question marks all over, whether it's because of youth or that they're generally unproven as performers. And since the Irish haven't been particularly stellar at stopping the run the past couple seasons as it is, it's a concern."

Though Brian Stouffer suggested that Ethan Johnson was a hybrid DE/OLB, that's apparently a matter of some debate. What isn't up for debate is that the Notre Dame front four is way smaller than even Michigan's, and probably about as young. This is from the Irish Eyes publisher:

Junior Ian Williams and sophomore Ethan Johnson are a talented pair, but both struggled vs. the Wolf Pack’s veteran front line. Irish defensive ends Kerry Neal and John Ryan are undersized on the right side (quality pass rushers that can struggle at the point of attack) and Notre Dame features a redshirt freshman at left defensive end who played in his first collegiate game last Saturday.

So that's a guy largely responsible for McGuffie mania, a guy I saw on skates against Nevada, and then small, production-free defensive ends. So maybe it's not a surprise that Notre Dame's tackle distribution is extremely encouraging for a team that seeks to pound the ball. It mirrors what happened last year, and last year the Michigan ground game had perhaps the easiest time they'd had against any opponent in South Bend:

After week 1, just as in 2008, the leading tacklers for the Notre Dame fighting Irish are both safeties: Kyle McCarthy with 7 and Harrison Smith with 5. DE Kerry Neal isn’t even on the stat sheet, Brian Smith, while making 2 very big plays, didn’t make a single other tackle, and Ethan Johnson had 1 tackle all game. Convince me that Michigan (sucks!) wont just run a “9 yards and a cloud of dust” offense against ND all freaking game.

Sorry to link to the short-bus section of the Notre Dame blogosphere, but the tackle distribution is a point of interest.

Notre Dame folk are pointing to Nevada's raw rushing numbers and avoiding the big flashing item of concern: in the limited attempts offered Nevada's clunky tailback he averaged 6.3 YPC. Wolfpack QB Colin Kaepernick averaged 7.5 yards per carry (sacks removed). Total YPC: 6.4. #2 rushing offense of last year, sure, but also a WAC team. In three games against BCS opposition (Texas Tech, Maryland, and Missouri, last year's #61, #71,  and #31 rushing defenses) the 2008 Wolfpack averaged 5 YPC (again, sacks removed). Notre Dame's defense was way, way worse than a motley collection of basically meh BCS run defenses. And this was not an artifact of a big lead. Nevada gashed Notre Dame time and again in the first half.

Couple that with last year's Michigan game, which featured virtually the same lines on both sides of the ball and one tailback that proved considerably less effective than the guy Michigan will deploy with gusto on Saturday, and you have a strong argument for Michigan to crush Notre Dame on the ground. This, by all appearances, is not a good run defense.

On the other side of the ball it's mildly concerning that against Western Michigan, a team replacing almost the entirety of its defense and three-quarters of its defensive line, Michigan bogged down a bit. There were numerous holding calls and they could not break any long runs aside from Denard Robinson's moment of magic—not exactly something the coaches drew up. Michigan's offensive line was missing the form they had late in 2008, but that may be an artifact of Western's aggressive scraping. If Notre Dame tries the same thing Michigan will be more likely to take the obvious countermeasures that were wide open against the Broncos.

The mostly healthy return of Brandon Minor will help, and Notre Dame doesn't have anyone as fast as Denard Robinson. This should be a huge advantage for Michigan; if it's not it's hard to see a Michigan win.

Key Matchup: Molk and guards versus Ian Williams and Ethan Johnson. Molk cannot have another game where he struggles and ends up with a couple holding calls. Ethan Johnson was on skates against Nevada and Ian Williams spent last year's Michigan game watching McGuffie run by him from the ground. Michigan needs to dominate this matchup.

Pass Offense vs. Notre Dame

There appears to be one, which is a nice change from last season. Tate Forcier was deadly accurate in his first game as a Michigan quarterback, and that should prove no fluke going forward. The downside of the freshman was entirely in missed reads against both run and pass and a couple of runs that were not as first-down oriented as they should have been.

So it sort of sucks that TAH-NOO-TAH has bumped aside Judas/mole Corwin Brown. Brown spent the last two games against Michigan in a cover-two umbrella and hardly ever blitzed or even put a seventh guy in the box. If Michigan hadn't fumbled six times in last year's game, boy howdy, we might have come within 18 points thanks to Brown's never-ending ability to sit back and calmly consider a situation for three or even four quarters. Tenuta just blitzes from everywhere.

This could go either way. Nevada took a couple of huge sacks and suffered a lot of QB pressure when they went to play action. Play action is an awkward thing in the pistol that requires the quarterback to turn his back away from the line of scrimmage and then end up sucking linebacker if they blitz right. Michigan won't let that happen; their offense never has the quarterback turn away from the line of scrimmage and bases its play action on the zone read, which necessarily occupies one of the defensive ends. But Nevada's passing game had a lot of experience. Michigan has little, and the guy who made the big plays last week is probably on the shelf. One way it could go is Forcier getting buried.

The other way mostly relies on excellent pickups from the backs—Carlos Brown had a couple crushing pickups last week and Brandon Minor is a fine blocker in his own right—and the idea that Forcier is, yes, Drew Tate, a guy extremely comfortable moving around and finding people downfield when the play breaks down. It's dangerous to blitz Pat White and it might be dangerous to blitz Forcier, albeit in a totally different way. If he evades the wave of defenders and breaks out to one side, we've already seen he can direct traffic to good effect.

Notre Dame's secondary is supposed to be pretty good. Safety Kyle McCarthy was the perfect idea of consistency in last year's Michigan game and returns; David Bruton, who was even better, is gone. He's replaced by Harrison Smith. (Notre Dame's version of "Robinson" is "Smith".) Darrin Walls returns from "personal issues" (read: academic issues) and Notre Dame has a stable of highly rated recruits with good experience plus senior Raeshon MacNeil. Unless Darryl Stonum—who was ranked one spot behind Mike Floyd by Rivals—suddenly lives up to the hype, Michigan's not going to get deep much unless it's Kevin Koger or one of the slots on a wheel route.

Those guys will be the key, IME: with Notre Dame blitzing its ass off Michigan will have opportunities underneath and down the seam. A couple of deep Koger completions can turn drives into points.

Key Matchup: Forcier versus his Self-Conception. Tenuta is going to send the kitchen sink and several times Forcier will be forced to scramble out or take a hot read or just do something smart. He did a lot of smart against Western; in high school, though, he responded with a bunch of picks when his offensive line fell off the map.

Run Defense vs. Notre Dame

The Notre Dame run offense exists as a sidelight to the passing game. Against Nevada, Notre Dame had two sorts of plays on the ground:

1. Successful runs that exploited Nevada's "explosive" (read: irresponsible) defensive ends and got Allen or Gray in vacated space.
2. Things that went about two yards.

That's something of an exaggeration, but… eh… not a huge one. Notre Dame's starting fullback is out and their backup is a converted tailback. As mentioned this morning, Notre Dame plans on rotating through the left side of its line, which is… um… bats, isn't it? Who does that?

As far as the rest of the line, realistic expectations are modest. Hamilton again:

I refuse to believe that offensive linemen who have been around for four or five years suddenly, all at once, in one offseason, go from mediocre to great. It just doesn't work that way. If the offensive line is consistently average, at least it's consistent. If it backslides to the way it's played at times last year and two years ago, it's going to cost Notre Dame a game it shouldn't lose.

It'll be up to Michigan's defensive line to actuate that backslide. That defensive line is not deep, but the first-line guys they run out are all seemingly competent, though Craig Roh remains a wiry true freshman and could find himself targeted when Notre Dame brings in more than one tight end. Which will probably be lots, more on that later.

Notre Dame had an even breakdown of draws, the inside zone, a counter, and an outside toss before they went zone nuts in garbage time. I know Weis will probably pull out 1,000 elephants and a dancing bear against Michigan, but Notre Dame's basic array of running plays won't be anything Michigan hasn't seen. You can put your practice time into one thing or the other and it's clear which phase Weis favors. With Aldridge out and Rudolph putting in a poor blocking display in the first game, Michigan should be able to handle Notre Dame's ground game without committing an extra man. Maybe.

Key Matchup: Obi Ezeh versus Armando Allen. Unless something funky's happened with Notre Dame's offensive line they aren't going to do a whole lot of crushing run blocks, but they will use a ton of misdirection, play action, and draws in an attempt to free up their bombs and exploit opponents set on stopping them. Ezeh displayed several instances of unnecessary hesitancy against Western and could be ripe for exploitation. In space, he must tackle.

Pass Defense vs. Notre Dame

Mmmmm. WAC snacks:

You've probably heard the obvious counterpunch to that re: Nevada, which finished 119th of 119 in I-A pass defense by a landslide last year and then lost two starters from the secondary. Clausen's day wasn't exactly unprecedented. Chase Daniel went 23 of 28 for 405 yards and four touchdowns. And, okay, Chase Daniel is pretty good. But when Louisiana Tech and UNLV combine to average 8.5 YPA and have five touchdowns to no interceptions… well… you're bad. Hawaii wasn't much competition, either. So the jury remains out for a guy whose four games before the WAC parade looked like this:

It is hereby stipulated that if Michigan gives up a 70-yard bubble screen and an awful underthrown bomb that features Purdue-level tackling, Michigan loses. Those things are in some doubt. I assume it's also stipulated that if Clausen throws two picks and half a touchdown, Notre Dame loses, and that's the average there in Notre Dame's last four games against plausible competition (and Syracuse).

If the Nevada game is an indication, Michigan's inability to go to a nickel package isn't likely to be much of the factor. The Notre Dame opener saw a severe reduction in three-wide sets:

In their place were a ton of standard I-form packages and 2TE ace sets. With Aldridge out, expect ace sets to be even more prevalent. Michigan should be able to match up pretty well against Notre Dame's big two receivers without dipping into the nonexistent corner depth. Not that they'd go to said nonexistent depth anyway: with Stevie Brown at strongside linebacker, the threat of a Robby Parris or Duval Kamara—both ponderous possession sorts—isn't the sort that demands a zippy cornerback. Any personnel grouping other than the base is unlikely. 

Okay: base personnel versus base personnel. Advantage: hell if I know. Before the season I was seriously down on this matchup but after watching four different members of Michigan's defensive line tear through the Western offensive line—a veteran unit extremely well-versed in pass blocking—and Donovan Warren try to get a grip on his new super powers, I actually think this tilts more towards neutral.

The main concern is when Notre Dame does something like, oh, I don't know, keep nine guys in to block and run a one-man route with Golden Tate. Everything was going swimmingly in the Western game until they pulled a similar stunt and though the burned corner doesn't figure to play on Saturday unless disaster befalls the secondary, free safety Troy Woolfolk also picked up an ugly –3 in UFR for his part in the play.

Michigan need pressure from the front four against regular (non max-pro) sets, and eventual pressure against the max pro. All of Michigan's guys this year are high motor sorts who will get after the ball; no Terrance Taylors or Will Johnsons who aren't much use against the pass. When the starters are in, Michigan should get pressure, and Clausen still hasn't proven he can deal with pressure.

Key Matchup: God, I've waffled on this a thousand times. I'll settle with Corners Man Up Against Floyd And Tate, as Notre Dame will attempt to take the Michigan defensive line out of the game with max protect a lot and in those instances it will be up to Warren and Cissoko to not get burnt toasty.

Special Teams

This is a virtual unknown for both teams except when Zoltan rolls onto the field ready to shoot lightning bolts down the opponent's face. So… advantage Michigan there. Both kickers are almost totally untested. Jason Olesnavage does have a pretty 44-yard field goal to his credit, and it sounds like Michigan's kickoff guy is considerably better than Notre Dame's. Slight advantage here to Michigan.

Key Matchup: HOLD ON TO THE DAMN BALL.

Intangibles

Cheap Thrills

Worry if...

• Receivers are shaking free from the cornerbacks even a little.
• Rodriguez doesn't have a TAH-NOO-TAH counterpunch.
• Notre Dame's offensive line looks competently coached for a change.

Cackle with knowing glee if...

• Notre Dame's defensive line is just as prone to skate backwards as they were last year.
• Rodriguez has a package that neutralizes the blitz.
• They don't double Brandon Graham.

Fear/Paranoia Level: 5 out of 10. (Baseline 5, +1 Hey That Touchdown Last Week Looked Familiar, +1 for And Wow We Are Going Up A Team That Would Win The WAC, –1 for …But Is Still Coached By Charlie Weis, –1 for …And I Can't Emphasize This Enough, –1 for… Seriously, +1 for …Okay Maybe That One Was Excessive, +1 for Major Quarterback Experience Deficiency, –1 for But Our Defensive Line Should Consume Their Souls, –1 for And I Know We Worked Harder, Apparently, You Dolphin Puncher, +1 for It Takes Time To Dig Out From 3-9.).

Desperate need to win level: 7 out of 10. (Baseline 5, –1 Sort Of Playing With House Money, Right?, +1 for Yeah, Sort Of Not, +1 for Boy All That Hot Seat Talk Would Go From Frustrating To Entertaining, +1 for I Love Me Some This Week In Notredamenfreude Fodder, –1 for Home Dog And Close Loss Is Understandable, +1 for This Week Always Reminds Me That Internet Notre Dame Fans Should Be Shot Into Space.)

Loss will cause me to... probably curse Angry Michigan Safety-Hating God.

Win will cause me to... start thinking New Year's Day.

The strictures and conventions of sportswriting compel me to predict:

I think I changed my mind from earlier in the week, when I predicted Notre Dame victories a couple of times. The main reasons for this reversal:

• observation of the ND DL against Nevada coupled with a closer look at the stats and the words out there.
• minute UFR evaluations of Donovan Warren.
• minute UFR evaluations of Michigan's starting DL and the pass rush that comes from everywhere.

Given the data the biggest mismatch in this game is not the Notre Dame passing offense against the Michigan secondary, but the Michigan ground game against Notre Dame's defensive line. I think Forcier can make the blitz backfire just enough and Michigan will pop more guys free than Notre Dame.  Clausen's potential improvement is the wildcard. If he's actually as good as he's looked against the WAC, Michigan loses. I don't think he is.

In a game where both teams figure to get to the quarterback a lot, it's about coping with that. Michigan's run game is better prepared to do that than Notre Dame's, and Tate Forcier might not be too far off Clausen with his "scrambling" and "playing for a high school that did something other than win 63-7."

I reserve the right to change my opinion ten minutes into tomorrow's game. I've already waffled once this week, and I have almost no faith in the predictions I'm about to put on the line. But I do have a little.

Finally, opportunities for me to look stupid Sunday:

• Michigan does some crazy trick play stuff.
• Michigan tailbacks crack into the secondary lots, with Minor, Shaw, and Brown getting a near-equal distribution of the carries. Quarterback runs are down considerably.
• Notre Dame gets a bomb to Tate; Floyd is contained by Warren.
• Brandon Graham gets two sacks.
• Michigan, 27-23.

The re-rank. More on Evan Smotrycz and the hype train a-buildin':

"I was pretty impressed with him; he's pretty tough," Daniels said. "I heard the rumblings about him. He was known as a guy that can really shoot the ball, and I hadn't seen him before so he was a priority guy for us." …

"I expected him to be able to shoot the ball well from deep," Daniels said. "I was surprised with how he attacked the rim and surprised with his toughness. Against Jayvaughn Pinkston, one of the tougher guys in the class, Evan more than held his own. He mixed it up inside, and I was thoroughly impressed with him."

It's getting to be that time when the scouting sites put their rankings where their mouths are, and the first vote is in. Scout has slid Smotrycz up to #17 amongst power forwards. He still a three star, but he's right on the verge of a fourth. The #16 guy, Melvin Tabb, is #73 on Scout's preliminary list of 75 kids, so Smotrycz is probably around #80. That's a big step forward from unranked and virtually unknown.

(Side note: one of the Rivals mods posted that Prep Spotlight shot Smotrycz all the way to #46 in their latest rankings, but there's no way to link—Prep Spotlight's website is defunct and it exists only as a magazine.)

The flameout. The Free Press considers Michigan's 2005 recruiting class, which turned into Mario Manningham, Terrance Taylor, and not much else. This is territory this blog has gone over in detail. The 2004 and 2005 classes, in summary:

Michigan got killed by back-to-back classes that saw a ton of attrition at key spots. Basically the only thing Michigan has to show from the 2004 and 2005 classes is the defensive line, which was Big Ten championship caliber.

The rest of the team? Is not.

By the time Rodriguez arrived at Michigan the excellent recruiting classes of the late Carr era had already been decimated, and few of the departures afterward were unusual. The attrition was worst on the offensive line, which was terrible early until finding some sort of footing as the season approached its merciful end. Speaking of…

The WTF. The Wall Street Journal puts together a piece on offensive line experience and its correlation with football success—strong—and just as you're bracing for Michigan to find itself on the face-punched list you get this shocking table:

Holy hotpants. I guess that's what happens when you return every single player on the line. A small caveat for the hope implied here: a number of those starts won't see the field as Ferrara and McAvoy get booted to the bench in favor of Huyge or Omameh.

Other bits of interest:

• If Penn State's offense undergoes an inexplicable collapse after returning Royster and Clark, the line might be why. Or the vast talent deficit at WR.
• If Notre Dame can't run the ball this year they never will.
• Remember how everyone was predicting one last bash for West Virginia followed by a swift, Bill Stewart-spurred immolation? Yeah.

The confession. File this under "things you already knew":

“Last year all I did was supervise. I was more of an observer,” Paterno said of his 11-2 team that lost to Southern California in the Rose Bowl. “I have a heck of a staff. Those two years I didn’t do much. Last year we had a pretty good football team, and I didn’t do much.”

So all those shots of Paterno sitting in the press box never talking into his for-show headset meant what we thought they meant: Tom Bradley is Penn State's head coach, and a pretty good one from appearances. (HT: EDSBS.)

The mocking. This goofy video put together by a bunch of kids is more entertaining than it has any right to be:

They also listed it as a reply to 'Jimmy Clausen for Heisman,' which never fails to rope me in for the whole 2:16.

The enemy. Sunday Morning Quarterback surveys the great gray menace:

This is definitely a "rebuilding" year with a lot of uncertainty on paper, destined for the fringe of the top-10 in all the preseason magazines -- and still, Ohio State is likely to be favored in every game except USC, with Penn State serving as the toss-up for the auto bid to the Rose Bowl (where OSU, for all its success, hasn't been in more than a decade). I'm willing to project a conference loss, although I don't know where it will come from if not the Nittany Lions, and another 10-2 effort will be hard for the BCS to ignore.

The whole thing is, as always, a good thing to spend your time reading.

Etc.: MVictors examines the 1934 Willis Ward controversy in detail.

Expect more Saturday night in the future. This is a bit old, but, uh, yeah. Busy. Anyway, ABC's Saturday night football initiative was a major success:

An average of 14.5 million households tuned in to ABC's Michigan-Ohio State on a Saturday afternoon, making it college football's most-watched game since 1992. But the next seven most-watched games this season — Notre Dame-Southern California, Ohio State-Texas, California-USC, Florida State-Miami (Fla.), Notre Dame-Michigan State (leading regionalized coverage in a slot also including USC-Arizona), Notre Dame-Georgia Tech and Ohio State-Iowa — were all in prime time.

They were also all on Saturday nights on ABC, which raised its Saturday prime-time ratings 28% by focusing on football. The exception was FSU-Miami on ESPN. That was on Labor Day night, back when experts said both teams were actually good. The only other game drawing more than 5 million households: NBC's Penn State-Notre Dame, a day game that got 5.3 million.

Michigan has long resisted night games, but that's going to get more and more difficult as ABC pushes for winged helmets in its prime time slot. There have been rumblings that Michigan can either choose between a home game at night or three on the road in future years; they might have to cave. Probably not next year, though. Michigan's road slate doesn't exactly scream "FEATURE ME":

• @ Northwestern
• @ Illinois
• @ Michigan State
• @ Wisconsin

You can probably pencil in Wisconsin as a night game -- and a hell of a challenge if the Badgers adequately replace Joe Thomas and John Stocco -- but the rest of that slate is ratings death.

Dan Steinberg is excited!!!!!!!!!! "Vegas Chooses Michigan!!!!!," says Dan, and that's a sequence of punctuation I am deeply uncomfortable with. Anyway:

Some people, including Brian at mgoblog, said loudly that I was wrong [about letting Vegas guys pick the BCS]. And now, in the most delicious of all possible ironies, an apoplectic Brian is using Vegas as justification that Michigan is being robbed!!!!!! I told you Brian!!!!!! You should have listened to me!!!!

For the record, this was my stirring conclusion in the piece cited above:

Striking a balance between style-point madness and rote you-win-you-stay is a delicate thing. While you can very plausibly argue the latter holds too much sway in the BCS selection process, the oddsmakers are the communism to our current fascism: yeah, they're diametrically opposed, but neither is a good idea.

My main complaint with the Vegas rankings as deployed was their wild under-reaction to events. At the time that poll was posted, LSU was 5-2 with wins over nobody and losses to Florida and Auburn. They were #5, ahead of Florida and Auburn. To Vegas, the games hardly mattered. Anyone rushing to say that LSU at #5 was darn prescient should note #2 Texas, 6-1 and then ahead of a wide array of undefeated teams. Hell, suddenly Alamo-bound Texas is still #8 in their poll.

My objection was to letting Vegas' opinion override wide disparities in actual performance on the field. When you have two teams that have virtually identical resumes by every objective measure you can apply that's a very different situation, one in which you have to look at how the teams reached their finishing point and who looks better, because there's no concrete way to separate the two. In that case, the opinion of Vegas wiseguys is highly relevant.

But when it comes down to it... I must offer a mea culpa in the spirit of Dan's post (!!!!):

DAN STEINBERG IS THE GENIUSEST!!!!! HE IS RIGHT THAT A SMALL, INFORMED GROUP OF EXPERTS WHO ARE EMPLOYED BASED ON THEIR ABILITY TO PROJECT FOOTBALL GAMES IS A BETTER WAY TO PICK THE NATIONAL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME THAN LETTING A BUNCH OF DOOFS VOTE*!!!!! I OWE HIM SOME BEER!!!!

If you need a letter of recommendation or something, Dan, I got your back. With a select group of Michigan engineering students, there's no better reference.

*(As long as some other group narrows down the potential candidates so they can't pick, say, a 9-3 Texas.)

I was already going to call him "Jimmah!" The Chicago Sun-Times sucks up to Notre Dame fans with this hilarious headline:

'He's just little Jimmy'

Dad's comment aside, Notre Dame awaits special QB

The manual says insert unflattering image of Clausen here...

Check. Manual further instructs to highlight this quote:

[USC commit Marc] Tyler, who is black, also saw in Clausen someone capable of fitting in with anyone.

''Jimmy's really into hip-hop music,'' Tyler said. ''He's always trying the latest dances: 'Lean Wit It, Rock Wit It,' the 'Chicken Noodle Soup.' It's like he's black on the inside.''

I got nothin'. That's just a weird quote, and anything I say could come out really wrong. Moving on.

Yeah, we're not happy. I didn't want to wrap up the Michigan outrage. Thankfully, Double Extra Point did it for me. Missed a couple Hoover Street Rag posts, including the best headline anyone's thrown up: "Quag-meyer." Sad giggity. Also excellent: a simple "INFAMY!"

He's Michigan. Forget that. From the SBT:

Notre Dame professor Brad Malkovsky was in the middle of teaching his "Christianity and World Religions" course a few weeks ago when the classroom phone rang.

Never in his 15 years of teaching in that room had the phone even made a peep.

Startled, Brad picked it up.

"A woman on the phone, who sounded like a reporter, asked if this was Lloyd Carr, the head football coach of the University of Michigan," Brad says.

So he repeated the women's inquiry for the benefit of his 70-some students: "No this is not Lloyd Carr, the head coach of the University of Michigan football team," Brad answered.

She apologized and hung up.

That is a hell of a wrong number.

That's right, Tom. Brady on Fiasco '06:

"Anyone who has seen (Florida) play realizes it is a no-brainer. Florida is not very good. I watched that game (Saturday) night and that other (Arkansas) quarterback completed like three passes the week before. They have 18 guys out there throwing passes for Arkansas," Brady said.

When a reporter countered that Michigan already had its shot at beating the Buckeyes, Brady said, "But that's not the way the BCS works. It is supposed to be the two best teams in college football. I would vote for Michigan to play Ohio State if I had a vote."

So meone get that man a vote.

Etc. Wetzel on Don Canham. Mick McCabe declares incoming freshman Manny Harris the best player in the state. Kelvin Grady is #11. OSU is going to turf next year. Bo recollection from a friend of Shemy's. They have Drew Sharp in California, too. EDSBS gives us ten reasons to be happy.